Select video games can create a community knit so tightly that it feels like a surrogate family. These communities pop up all over, from intense MMORPGs and silly MOBAs to intense futuristic shooters and monster-collecting movie titles. For some players, turning on their favorite game is like coming home.
I found one of those communities within the unstable and unsupported servers of Team Fortress 2 on the PlayStation 3. Shortly after the late 2007 release of Valve’s The Orange Box, a compilation featuring the multiplayer shooter alongside Portaland Half-Life 2, a few hundred people came together to play competitively, creating their own online forum to organize tournaments. I was amongst those people. It was the beginning of something wonderful.
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My friends and I escaped boring nine-to-five jobs, home stresses and school bullies by taking control of colorful troublemakers in what’s gone down as one of video gaming’s greatest-ever team-based shooters. But while Team Fortress 2 still enjoys a sizable player base on Steam, that popularity never extended to the PS3 community. The console versions of the game—it came out for Xbox 360, too (and is now backwards compatible with Xbox One)—always seemed like an afterthought for Valve and distributor/server manager EA.
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